


advancement

by deniigiq



Series: electric sheep [4]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, M/M, Music, and the guitar pillow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 19:03:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13841055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: He’d never felt so mad in his life. He’d been there with Matt crying on the floor of that fucking gym at fucking midnight. Sobbing. Crying so hard he stopped his own damn heart and now here he was trying to deny it. Foggy didn’t care if it was some mob-mafia-satanic cult-whatever who did this. He would not be lied to.





	advancement

**Author's Note:**

> This is a continuation of projection; part 4 in the anthropomorphism series. Would strongly recommend reading those guys first or you may be very (or delightfully, I don't know your life) confused. 
> 
> Matt has three pretty distinct personalities, depending on his frame of mind. He's got cyborg-android Matt who is kind of sweet and dopey and sad and lonely. Then you have Devil-bot Matt who is, obviously, a walking ball of anger issues. Then you have human-Matt who is the original flavor of human disaster. Who you get all depends on how and when you approach him 'cause his whole psyche is kind of fragmented.

Foggy hadn’t seen Matt in almost a week since his cyborg-human-android breakdown.

He’d turned back on after five minutes on the floor in the gym with Foggy, but had been very much not-Matt. He was languid and formal in all the wrong ways. Foggy returned him to the lab and, through the tightness in his throat, told Antonio that he needed to talk with Ernst and Maiko and maybe even George the next day.

He’d only managed to get Ernst and Maiko—George was off doing whatever it was she did when normal humans ate and slept and blinked.

Ernst and Maiko were more than enough, though. He couldn’t imagine having any more people in the room with him while he cried his eyes out and tried to explain Matt’s lingering humanity and reset. They both looked at each other and Maiko narrowed her eyes and pointed an accusing finger at Ernst, growling “I _told_ you.”

Ernst sighed one of his bone-weary, put-upon sighs and clenched his fingers in his hair. Maiko, apparently over her unfortunate victory, rubbed wide circles into his back.

“It shouldn’t be possible,” she said softly. “He doesn’t have any mechanisms to store those kinds of memory. We aren’t even really sure how he finds his memories once we’ve got him hooked up to extra space and processors. It’s like whoever did this to him coded his—and I hate this word—essence into his programming. It’s not scientific.”

“If he was learning about memories,” Ernst groaned, “Or making them up or something then I could understand. That’s how super-advanced AIs work—they start to make their own learning programs and kind of develop reactions through networks of information. It’s not consciousness, though. They can’t draw on memories from before they were AIs—at least they can’t draw on their own.”

Foggy felt drained. He felt like he’d been swallowing and crying sand. He couldn’t do anything but nod.

 

 

Ernst kept Matt in the lab for the time being; he wasn’t allowed to go to Foggy’s room. Foggy insisted that whatever Matt had done in the gym, he wasn’t going to be violent with _Foggy_. He was sure of it.

But Ernst wasn’t swayed. His lips stayed in a thin line and he told him that they’d see what George had to say before they made any decisions.

But Foggy was a contrary sonofabitch so if Ernst wanted to keep Matt in the lab, fine. Foggy would just take his happy ass to the lab.

He’d never seen Matt’s little bot-nook before and it was kind of cool, but mostly numbing. He wasn’t used to seeing Matt turned off.

Matt’s nook was shaped like a slightly inclined, vertical gurney. He was the last in a line of six bots, all dressed in the same IT t-shirts and light grey athletic tights. Because the robotics team was not even half as soul-less as the other tech departments, someone had gone through with craft paper and made each bot a little name tag on a Columbia pennant. Some names had little hearts or flowers drawn around them. The blue in the name-tag pennants almost matched the IT t-shirts.

Foggy realized that each grad student was assigned a rack of bots. He could tell because some people had stuck post-it notes along the gurney edges between bots to remind them that so-and-so needed such upgrade, or so-and-so had X malfunction.

Ernst had mounted small whiteboards next to his twelve IT bots. Matt’s whiteboard was mottled with color and speckled with the remnants of notes erased by a hand. Maiko’s bots, the next row over, all wore lighter baby-blue Library Support t-shirts and white athletic tights. All her post-it notes were shaped like fruits and cats.

It could have been so, so much worse.

 

 

Foggy brought the guitar pillow and tucked it into the crook of Matt’s lifeless, heavy elbow and then sat at the table between Matt’s rack and the next one over (full of royal blue and black outfitted Registration bots). He tried his damnedest to study. He thought about bringing the guitar, but worried that he would bother the grad students trying to work in the lab. The goal was to be low-key and not get kicked out.

George wandered in dripping with some unidentifiable fluid on the third day and gave him a heart attack when she crashed down onto the table next to him. Her thick black hair was tangled up into the semblance of what had once been a bun, maybe two days ago. Face still flat against the table, she pointed a fierce finger at him and said,

“You’re next.”

Then she passed out and Foggy had to go get Maiko to make sure she hadn’t fucking died.

 

 

Finally, _finally_ Ernst finished whatever it was that he’d been working on and had time to work on Matt. He told Foggy that they needed to try to talk with Matt about what had happened. George was going to help drive the conversation. He asked Foggy to stay where he was and not say anything to Matt before he booted him up. He pressed the button on the panel behind Matt’s whiteboard and Matt’s eyes opened. He didn’t move and so didn’t drop the guitar pillow.

Ernst asked him some codes and had him repeat some programmed responses back to him before he pressed another button which released a noise like some kind of hydraulic lift. Matt adjusted himself as his back was detached from his gurney and he once again bore his own weight. Ernst moved to retrieve a tablet from his desk and Matt cocked his head and noticed Foggy.

He lit up and stumbled over to him like a puppy learning to walk—all enthusiasm, no coordination. He flopped down next to Foggy on the bench and then seemed to realize that he was holding the guitar pillow and fucking cuddled it.

No grown man on the planet had the right to be so cute. Foggy reminded himself that every bot movie ever made ended in tragedy. But he couldn’t help but smile.

“Hey buddy, how you been?” Matt hummed his usual processing noise with a smile. Then abruptly it dropped off his face. He turned his face away from Foggy towards his lap, and he hugged the pillow. Foggy frowned and cocked his head.

“Matty? What’s wrong?”

He shook his head, still facing down.

“Matty, it’s okay, you can tell me.”

“He malfunctioned,” Ernst said from behind them, “They’re programmed to act submissive when they’re reprimanded. Sometimes they can anticipate it. Like a third of Maiko’s do.”

He sat down heavily on the bench opposite them.

“Matt, I didn’t give you clearance to leave your station,” he continued without looking up from his tablet. Foggy was taken aback. He hadn’t realized that Matt needed clearance to do things like that. Matt made himself smaller. Ernst finally looked up and stared at him for a long time.

“It’s okay, just don’t do it again,” He said, then he smiled. “We don’t want you tripping and falling before your motor functions kick in.” Foggy blinked.

“Like a puppy.” He realized.

“Yeah, it’s kind of cute,” Ernst grinned, now enthusiastically tapping away to his notes. “Except Lin and Deb never wait for them to get their sea-legs before they start working on them and, man, these guys are heavy. It’s a pain in the ass to get them up off the floor.”

Foggy turned back to Matt; he still hadn’t moved out of his hunch, but he had turned his face a little towards Foggy with a tiny grin. The guy was practically vibrating. Foggy looked at Ernst who glanced over and shrugged.

“Matt, do you want? A hug?” Foggy tried, before getting bowled over by 170 pounds of cyborg-android and guitar pillow.

“Alright, big guy. Once you’ve had your fun, we’re going to the big lab,” Ernst laughed from his place of safety. Matt perked up at “big lab.” Even Foggy knew that “big lab” meant human-time for Matt.

Foggy had seen human-Matt a few times, but never for more than ten minutes at a time (all of which were full of snark and identity checks). Cyborg-android-Matt, however, always seemed happier after he spent some time hooked up to the additional processors, so Foggy was pleased that he’d at least get that out of it.

“Music after two hours of studying?” Matt asked Foggy’s shoulder. Foggy sighed and scrubbed at Matt’s hair.

“Only if you’re good.”

 

 

George was already in the big lab when they got finally got through the security locks. Matt continued to vibrate. Ernst had gently taken the guitar pillow from him and leaned it against Matt’s gurney-station. Foggy was a little disappointed, he wanted to see how slightly more suave, human-Matt would handle it.

The big lab was a larger, enclosed version of Ernst’s space. It had a desk with a set of computers mounted on it and a stainless steel table for bots to sit on. Shoved in the space beneath the table were multiple racks of additional processing units with wires coiled on top of them. Foggy knew from experience that there were two identical rows of the units behind the three peeking out from under the table. There was a shelf lined with cubby holes out of which various attachments and plugs and wires and cables hung. They looked like garden snakes to Foggy and he wondered why there were so many different cables when all of the bots were supposed to have similar hardware.

Well, then there was Matt with all his extra bits and bobs. He couldn’t be the only one with extra features. Okay, fine so maybe all those attachments were warranted.

The rest of the room was the same as the lab—gray and white, relatively clean.

George spent most of her time in there and it showed. She was a pen thief and the desk was littered with them. She had what appeared to Foggy to be 15 different windows open between the two monitors and was clicking through them with a furrow in her brow.

Matt knew exactly where he needed to be and was stoked to be there. He traced a hand across the desk, found the table and then hopped onto it with extraordinary grace considering he’d nearly eaten shit out by the table with Foggy.  Ernst laughed and grabbed Foggy’s shoulders to put him in the corner with George as he went to go start hooking wires into Matt’s ports behind his ears and in the nape of his neck.

Foggy felt bad because he knew everyone’s good mood wasn’t going to last. Not with the questions they were going to have to ask.

George anticipated it too. She ran a hand over her face, slightly smearing her eyeliner before turning to Foggy.

“I’m recording the whole thing in case we need to take legal action.” She told him.

Foggy recoiled.

“What legal action could we possibly take?” he asked, “Even if some crazy underground mob or whatever made him into—well, him—it’s not like we can chase them down and make ‘em pay.”

George stared at him for barely a moment.

“If we find out there are others like him, we have a responsibility to put an end to it. We can’t ethically use bots of non-consenting people. That’s beyond fucked,” she said. Foggy shut up and nodded.

 

 

They turned Matt off and then booted him back up after all the wires were where they needed to be. This time, when he opened his eyes, he felt completely different. Languid and sleepy like he’d just woken up. He titled his head slightly at various angles as George asked him questions and started to sit up straighter. The tension in his shoulders crawled into his spine instead.

“What is your name?”

“Matthew Murdock.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Columbia University.”

“What is your line of work?”

“ _Was._ What _was_ my line of work. Paralegal. Now,” Matt brushed a hand over his shirt, tracing the fabric paint on it, “IT?”

Foggy couldn’t help but chuckle. Human Matt was great; he had all the easy charm of cyborg-android Matt and twice the snark. George’s lips twitched but she didn’t laugh.

“Can you please verify your Social Security Number and birthdate?” Matt did.

“I’ve had four fillings and a crown,” he continued before George could ask another question, “My father’s name was Johnathan, my middle name is Michael, and I have no living relatives.” George looked slightly offended, but Foggy was starting to sense what Maiko called her ‘excited aura.’

“Mr. Murdock, how do you bake a cake?” She asked from left field.

“As fast as you can?” he asked with a shark’s grin. Smartass.

“Okay, you’ll do.” George navigated through the various windows on her screen. Ernst touched her shoulder and she nodded.

“Mr. Murdock—”

“Matt,” Matt cut him off abruptly. His brow furrowed and he turned his head slightly, “I—why—I feel like—you call me Matt?” Ernst’s eyes widened and he looked at George who shared the expression and then gestured for him to continue.

“I do, sorry, um. Matt. We would like to record this session with you in the case that any legal codes are breached or reveal themselves to have been breached in the past. Will you give your consent to the recording?” Matt seemed confused before he lifted his head in Foggy’s direction.

“Who is that?” he asked. He asked every time. Foggy wasn’t offended that human Matt didn’t remember him—android Matt did enough for both of them.

“That’s Franklin Nelson. Foggy. He’s a friend of yours.” Foggy smiled reassuringly even though he knew Matt couldn’t see it. “Matt, this is important. Do you consent to the recording?”

Matt nodded.

“Sorry, I need a verbal confirmation.”

“Yes, I consent.” Was an android’s consent permissible in a court of law?

“Oh, okay. Good. So, I’m just going to jump right in. Mr. Nelson--uh--Foggy recently went through an incident with you, Matt. Do you have any recollection of what that incident might have been or where might have taken place?”

Matt thought. It was pretty weird when he didn’t make his processing face.

“It was,” he bit his lip, “Wait. Sorry. Was it? It was a--? There was a gym?” Foggy’s whole body felt rigid. Matt remembered, how the _fuck_ did he remember. He couldn’t remember Foggy. He asked every time he got plugged in who Foggy was.

“Sorry,” Matt said, holding his head towards Foggy again. “You—Foggy--Did you? You took me. It was night.”

Ernst looked a little like he was going to pass out. George was trying valiantly to keep her poker face.

“Foggy,” Ernst squeaked, “Can you confirm?”

He nodded.

“I need a verbal—”

“Sorry, yeah. Yeah, I took you to a gym, Matty.” Matt recoiled.

“Matty? Who said you could—” Foggy didn’t even think.

“Oh god. I’m so sorry, I just—It just slipped—I can stop?” Or he could shoot himself in the fucking foot because hey, what could possibly hurt worse than subtle rejection?

“Yeah, please. Just Matt.” Ha. Blatant rejection. That’s what.

“Sorry. Matt. I—yeah, I took you to the gym at night about week and a half ago.” He skillfully ignored the stricken look Ernst was giving him. Yeah, buddy, he didn’t know where this curveball came from either. Not ten minutes ago Matt was literally all over him like white on rice. Ernst collected himself and pushed forward, faster this time.

“Matt, do you remember anything else about that night?”

“There was. A punching bag I think. You—Foggy—you told me to relax? You touched my arm.” Matt screwed his face up and then brought up his hands to rub at his temples. Foggy fleetingly wondered what it felt like to touch yourself and realize that none of it was the you you’d grown up with.

“You told me—you let me—I hit the—” Matt’s whole body froze. “I hit the bag.” The inflection left his voice. For a second Foggy thought he’d slipped back into cyborg-android Matt, but then realized that no, that was just the sound of horror in Matt’s voice. George took over.

“You hit the bag, and then what?” She asked.

“I hit the bag.” Matt repeated. He fell silent and his head dipped low. The two scientists exchanged looks with each other and then Foggy. Ernst shrugged his shoulders all the way up to his ears and mouthed “now what?” George bared her teeth in a ‘yikes’ way. Foggy decided to take the plunge.

“You hit the bag, like, a lot. And then you, uh, kinda started screaming, pal. Do you remember screaming?” Foggy asked. Matt jerked his head up right at Foggy. His face darkened. He curled his lips into a snarl. That plummeting feeling was back in Foggy’s stomach.

“I didn’t say anything.” He spit out. Foggy reeled back. “I didn’t fucking say anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Two could play at that game, asshole.

“Uh yeah, actually you fucking did,” He barked right back. “You started screaming about revoking something. Said you lied. Said it was some kind of—”

“I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING,” Matt snarled, throwing himself off the table. He somehow made himself bigger, spreading his arms slightly, tension seizing his back and shoulders, rolling them slightly forward. His neck flexed the way it did when he shocked himself on the socket in Foggy’s room. It was terrifying. But Foggy was stupid— _stupid_. He couldn’t let this go.

“Confirmation. You said you—”

“I didn’t say that—”

“Revoked your confirmation.”

“I _didn’t_ say that.”

“Yes, you did! Why are you denying it—”

“I don’t remember—”

“Yes you do—”

“I don’t.

“YOU FUCKING DO.” Foggy shouted. He’d never felt so mad in his life. He’d been there, with Matt crying on the floor of that fucking gym at fucking midnight. Sobbing. Crying so hard he stopped his own damn heart and now here he was trying to deny it. Foggy didn’t care if it was some mob-mafia-satanic-cult-whatever who did this. He would **not** be lied to.

Ernst’s voice broke the silence.

“Mr. Murdock, Foggy would never lie to us.” Matt said nothing, his jaw twitching from being clenched so hard. George wasn’t about to let Ernst try to mediate this alone.

“Mr. Murdock, something happened to you. Something illegal. I’m sure of it.”

“Nothing. Happened.”

“You arrived to this university with no papers. You were in terrible shape. You have non-standard equipment—”

“Nothing—“ George charged ahead.

“You’ve tried to kill people in this department. I personally had to disable your coding. You tried to garrote my advisor. You broke an intern’s arm. You choked out two grad students. We had to manually shut you down—”

“Don’t you fucking touch me.”

“We won’t. But we have nothing on you. _Nothing._ You’re an anomaly. You have to know that. You shouldn’t be talking to us right now. No other bot does that. No other bot _can_ do that.”

“I’m no bot.”

“Yes you are. Who made you.”

“No one.”

“Someone made you,” George pressed. “Someone has to have made you.”

“No one.”

“What are you?” Foggy interrupted. “If you’re not a bot, what are you?” Matt narrowed his sightless eyes. Foggy’s heart pounded. He wanted cyborg-android Matt back. Sweet, gentle Matt. Matt didn’t say anything.

“You’re a bot,” George declared with finality. There was a long silence.

“I’m not a bot. I’m a weapon.” Matt said softly. George saw an opening and took it.

“Weapon or not, we will not hurt you, Mr. Murdock.” Matt jerked back a little in surprise. Foggy finally realized why he hadn’t come any closer. The wires kept him locked in place. One more step and he’d lose his consciousness.

“What do you mean? You people. Scientists—makers—hobbyists—whatever you are. You _always hurt us._ It’s what you do.” Ernst looked like he was going to be sick.

“What are you talking about?”

“You take them. Take the heart. Take the eyes. You take and we shake until we can’t even breathe. I can’t even breathe.” George’s eyes shot to the monitor.

“Mr. Murdock, you can’t take this kind of strain. You need to calm down or you’ll reset.”

“So? Just turn me back on. I want you people to know what you do—the kind of pain we go through—”

“They don’t do that shit,” Foggy stated as firmly as he could. “The people who did that to you, yeah maybe they hurt people, but these guys? No. Absolutely not. Don’t talk about my friends like that.”

Matt stood stock still.

“They make weapons.”

“We don’t.” George said. “but we want to know who does. Who did this to you, Matt? We need to know. Are there others like you? Where are they? How do you get involved? We can stop this.”

Matt made a noise which Foggy realized was a laugh. It was awful.

“Stop this? You? Them? That’s delusional.” He paused for a beat. The wires seemed very flimsy. “Why? Why would you do that? What do you have to gain?” The room fell silent. Foggy didn’t know how to even respond to that. Evidently, neither did the other two.

“Uh, truth, justice, and the American way?” he offered. Matt took a step back.

“Really?” George and Ernst exchanged looks with each other and then Foggy.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Ernst said. Matt looked like he’d been punched in the gut. If he had guts.

“You’re serious? You want to— What? Because it’s the right thing to do or--?” He really didn’t get it. Foggy wasn’t sure they could make it any clearer.

“Yeah, dude. I mean, some things aren’t that deep,” He said gently.

“Mr. Murdock, you’re going to short circuit. Why don’t you sit down?” George offered cautiously, one eyebrow raised at the monitor in front of her. Matt turned his head in her direction.

“I’m going to reset anyways, I can’t process this.”

And he did.

 

 

When Ernst said that bots were heavy, he’d neglected to mention that they were _fucking_ heavy, holy shit. Foggy thought he was used to Matt laying all over him, but no sir. The guy weighed a ton. It took all three of them to get him onto the table.

Ernst turned to the other two.

“Are we gonna turn him back on? Or should we unplug him?” Foggy was still pissed off enough that he kinda wanted to wake the guy up just to tell him he was being a dick to the people who were trying to help him. George hummed.

“I mean, we were really getting somewhere. Let’s give him a minute and then try again. He’s being scary, not violent. It’s kinda hot, not gonna lie.” She didn’t even entertain Foggy’s or Ernst’s scandalized faces; she just walked back over to the computers to look through her data.

“He’s definitely not like any other bot, and not just ‘cause he can pull memories and generate new ideas. He can process an unreal amount of data. I mean for real, his levels are usually pretty wonky for some reason, but I mean that just now? That was off the chart. And it’s like he can predict it.” Foggy swallowed.

“Maybe that’s because he’s human?” George scoffed.

“Listen Fogs, I know that you want this guy to be human and I know that he’s showing a hell of a lot of human behavior, but he’s not quite there. For one, if he was human, he’d be able to function like this without the extra processing power—”

“But he _has_. He remembered the gym—”

“And two, there’s not enough bio-material left for him to be human. I’m sorry Foggy. Someone amazingly clever must have programmed his personality into his base. We must not have been able to rewrite everything when we reprogrammed him. Maybe he has hidden code or backup code or something. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not calling it human until I’ve got repeatable results.”

“If he’s not human, why would he want to know our motivations? Why would he want to protect whatever it is he’s protecting?”

“He’s not wanting anything. He’s reacting to an advanced learning function; he’s searching for an if-then function to interpret the right response to what we are asking from him.”

“George,” Foggy placed a hand on her shoulder to make her look at him. “George, he’s human. I can feel it in my gut. Androids don’t cry. They don’t get scared or mad or whatever. He’s all those things. He can’t process them-- emotions—that’s why he keeps short circuiting. But he gets half-way through them. That’s gotta be some kind of sentience or empathy or whatever it is that makes people human, right?”

George pursed her lips.

“For the record,” Ernst offered, “I think that maybe he’s more cyborg. Usually we would classify a cyborg as a human with robotic additions, but there’s no rule that it can’t go the other way. Matt might be a robot with human additions. He’s definitely sentient, he just can’t maintain it. Not even with all this processing power,” he gestured to the wires. “But that’s because he’s using human thought patterns and methods, not android ones. Humans think with their whole bodies. Matt’s sensory input levels are through the roof all the time. I can’t bring them down, I’ve been trying for a year. It slows his processing speed, that’s why he kinda hums before answering. The extra processing power in this stuff helps him process the sensory input the way he is inclined to, that’s gotta be what is helping him think and remember things when he’s hooked up. He’s not thinking with just his brain, he’s thinking with his body and a lot of that is comparable to the biomaterial.”

“You’re suggesting that sensory input can replace most if not all biological processes that take place in the brain, Ernst,” George stated, speculative. “There are some things you just can’t make happen without those processes. Language, for example. Happiness.” Foggy noted that she wasn’t shooting him down, though.

“Matt can be happy.” Foggy offered hopefully.

“I mean, maybe,” Ernst carried on over Foggy’s suggestion. “But if Matt’s not functioning based off of some kind of sensory memory and he’s not drawing this stuff from his coding, where’s it coming from? His _essence_?” He said the word like it might wake up and haunt him. George hissed at him like a cat.

“Shut your whore mouth.”

“Then he’s human, or at least some very important part of him is.” Ernst finished, triumphant. Foggy looked between them, hopeful.

“You know what makes him really happy?” They both looked at him.

“Don’t say it.”

“The guitar pillow.”

“Are we seriously doing this?”

 

 

They were doing it. But waaaaay differently. Much better, with less confrontation. Ernst reattached the cables which had gotten unplugged when Matt hit the floor. George saved all her data and was resetting her monitors. Foggy ran home and got his guitar. He picked the guitar pillow up from Matt’s gurney too.

They arranged Matt on the floor this time and Foggy tucked the pillow in his arms the way he liked to cuddle it in Foggy’s room. He set down the guitar and gave a thumbs-up to the other two who were crouched behind the monitors in the security foyer. It was far enough away that Foggy and Matt had some privacy, but close enough for them to monitor and intervene should anything happen.

Ernst turned Matt back on from his tablet.

Matt didn’t respond right away, but his shoulders slumped. His body relaxed into a looser curl around the pillow. Foggy plucked a note on the guitar as gently as he could, but with enough strength to make it linger. It sounded louder in the lab, where was no bed or carpet to muffle it. Matt turned his head towards the noise and opened his eyes. He said nothing.

Foggy plucked the note again and let it fade. He did it again. He glanced back towards the security foyer and saw George’s emphatic thumbs up. Matt leaned a bit towards the guitar and then seemed to realize that he was laying on a pillow.

“Who are you?” he asked, running a hand along the pillow to work out its shape.

Foggy stopped his plucking and waited for the note to dissipate.

“My name is Foggy. I’m your friend.” Matt was quiet like he was when he was processing, he continued to pet the pillow.

“You took me to the gym,” he said softly, “I hit the bag.”

Foggy hummed his confirmation gently.

“Yeah, you scared the shit out of me. But anyways, did you like it?” Matt stopped stroking the pillow.

“Huh?” Foggy glanced over his shoulder again to see Ernst now frantically shaking a thumbs-up.

“I said, did you like it? The gym?” Matt wrapped his arms around the pillow and pulled it tight into his chest.

“This is Columbia. I got into this college. I wanted to go here.” He told Foggy. Foggy couldn’t quite pull his eyebrows back to neutral. It seemed like the reset had really calmed Matt down, but he was also kind of all over the place.

“Oh yeah? What for?” he asked. Matt buried his face into the pillow.

“My dad.” Unexpected. Roll with it, Nelson.

“He go here?”

“No,” Matt said to the pillow. “He was a boxer. He didn’t want—” he trailed off.

Foggy leaned back and strummed a chord. He let it reverberate in the air. Matt closed his eyes.

“He died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, man,” Foggy told the ceiling. Matt reached out and barely, just barely, Foggy felt his fingers brush against his on the strings. He strummed again. Matt waited until it was silent again before speaking.

“I was a kid. I was sent to an orphanage. I’m blind and I’m. I have problems. It didn’t go so well.”

“An orphanage? In this day and age? Damn, Annie, go on.” Matt laughed. He laughed and it was nothing like that terrible noise he’d made earlier; it was golden and amazing and yeah fuck, Foggy was besotted with a sentient machine gun with anger issues.

“Hey, is this in my head?” Matt asked suddenly, tracing fingers lightly over the guitar strings. Foggy tried and failed not to crack his neck in looking at the security foyer. Ernst signed the letters “o,” “m” and “g.”

“What do you mean?” Foggy asked, keeping his voice light.

“After I committed, it’s like I can’t make my body do things anymore. It’s a trip. My brain does things but then my body like, doesn’t follow through? I can’t get excited anymore or too sad or everything just starts over and I can’t remember what was supposed to happen. So, I just want to know, is this in my head? It’s okay if it is.”

Foggy strummed. He didn’t want to touch that shit with a ten foot pole. George’s clawed hands, however, indicated that she very much wanted him to pursue that line of questioning.

“Well, I don’t know what you committed to, but I can safely say that this isn’t in your head.” _Because you don’t have a brain anymore oh my GOD._

“I committed—” Matt paused and for a second Foggy was terrified he was going to remember his earlier meltdown and act on it, or equally terrifying, he was going to end that sentence with ‘murder.’ “Hey, it’s okay. Are you okay?”

Foggy cocked his head. Fake it ‘til you make it, friends.

“What? No, I’m fine. What’s up?” Matt hummed a noise a whole lot like his processing noise.

“I know you said it’s not, but I think this _is_ in my head, so I guess it’s okay if you know. Your heartbeat changed. It got fast. Usually means something excited you or upset you.” Foggy felt his heartrate jump and glanced over to see no helpful hands telling him how to handle this—whatever this was.

“There it happened again. It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you,” Matt said, relaxed against the pillow as though they were slightly buzzed best friends, not a guy sitting in a lab playing music to a new strain of humanity.

“I haven’t received orders in a long time.” Foggy forced himself to relax.

“I’m cool man, I promise. I mean the only orders I give are for takeout.” Matt made a softer version of his amazing laugh.

“The last order I remember was a kill order,” he offered dreamily. Foggy refused to lose his shit when he’d already come this far.

“No shit?”

“Yeah, but I fucked it up. I fucked them all up.”

“Fucked it up in like, a positive way or--?”

“Nah, more like a thrown-out-of-Intervention kind of way.”

“Intervention? Like the tv show? You a junkie? No judgement, here by the way. Totally judgement free zone.” Matt made his noise and unfurled a little so that he could turn his face to Foggy.

“No, more like the paramilitary group. Super secret, shhhh.” Foggy was desperately trying not to freak the fuck out and there was Matt pressing a finger to his lips and kind of smiling while he did it. He breathed out and strummed a few chords to keep his cool. Matt seemed to like them.

“Sorry, your heartbeat jumped again. Which is weird since this is my head. Why would I hear a heartbeat in my head? Is that my heartbeat?” _No pal, there is literally no way._

“No clue,” keep him happy, Nelson, “So Intervention. You fucked up. What happened?”

Matt hummed.

“I make a shit bot.” Foggy couldn’t keep himself from starting at that.

“Hey man, that’s not true. I bet you make a great bot,” he assured him. Matt frowned and pushed himself up onto an arm. Foggy took his hand off the guitar.

“Something’s not right,” Matt said. Foggy held his breath. “You sound too real.”

“I mean, technically reality is entirely relative?” Foggy offered. Matt sat all the way up and then got on his hands and knees. He leaned into Foggy’s space.

“I can’t smell you. That’s weird, why can’t I smell you?” Foggy didn’t know what that had to do with literally anything.

“I’m not an expert, but like, if we’re in your head why would you be able to smell me?” Matt pulled back fluidly, evidently considering this a fair and valid point.

“I can hear you though.”

“Pretty sure everyone hears voices in their heads. Just in different ways.” He was _earning_ that damn law degree. Look at these arguments. Flawless.

“Huh.”

“Yeah,” Foggy coaxed, trying to get them back on the road to actual answers. “Why do you think you’d make a shit bot?”

“Hm? Oh. I can’t just lay down and take things. Gotta fight, always fight. It’s exhausting. Really bad at following direction too. The kind of bots Intervention needs, well. They’ve got to be like, ask no questions. Tell no lies. That kind of thing.”

“And you can’t do that?” Matt laughed.

“Hell no. I want to be a lawyer. I am the definition of the devil’s advocate. Doesn’t suit that kind of thing.” Foggy frowned.

“Why’d you do it then? Why, um, commit?” Matt said nothing. He touched Foggy’s hand again and Foggy shook himself and played a few chords. Matt tucked himself back into his pillow.

“Was I mad at you?” Fuck. Fuck, getting off course.

“Why would you be mad at me?”

“I feel like I was mad at something, I can’t remember what.”

Foggy desperately looked to the security foyer. George had stood up and was mouthing and miming ‘just a little more.’ She’d be amazing at charades.

“Matt?”

“Hmm?”

“Why did you commit?” he asked, heart hammering. He was sure that this wasn’t going to work.

“Because I had to. Stick trained me. I gave my heart, my lung. What was I supposed to do? Pretend like nothing happened? Ignore the call? I’d never have made it to law school. They said that if you made it through Intervention, they’d give it all back. It was only a year, two at the most. And don’t let this pretty face fool you,” he beamed at Foggy, oblivious to Foggy’s heart crumbling. “I’m fucked up. There’s something in me. A Devil, she said. I needed to control it. I thought commitment would help me control it. And it did. I don’t feel the devil any more. But, I don’t think I feel anything anymore.”

Foggy wiped tears from his eyes. Matt reached out and caught his wrist.

“This isn’t in my head is it?” Foggy shook his head, sure that Matt could feel it. Matt sighed, or he tried to.

“Didn’t make it through Intervention after all, did I? Even in real life. Yeah, I heard that we’d all be fucked up bots. But,” Foggy could barely see him through all the tears, but he was still smiling. “I bet I went down swinging.”

“Matt, we want to help you.” He croaked out.

“I’m not human anymore.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I can’t argue with you, Foggy.”

“You have been.”

“No, I’ve just been answering.”

“You’re arguing right now.”

“It’s going to stop soon. It’s too much to process. My, uh, issues. It takes too much processing power.”

“If we keep you in a quiet place, if we reduce the—the everything—”

“I can’t maintain it. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t be sorry if you were just a bot.” Matt tried to sigh again.

“Okay listen. Your friends too,” Foggy sat up ramrod straight and nodded through his distress, then kicked himself because Matt couldn’t see it.

“Sorry, I just nodded. please tell me.”

“I probably can’t say it again. I can’t remember things after reset.” Foggy nodded frantically even though Matt couldn’t see. He didn’t trust himself to speak. “When I was twelve I was recruited into an organization. We never knew the name; we called it Advancement. It has a real name, but I don’t know what it is. They train people. People with certain abilities, heightened abilities. They find you and train you and then they ask you to commit and you do it ‘cause—well I don’t know why we do it, but we do. They take your heart and your eyes and they give you new ones,” Matt swallowed reflexively and started to talk faster, as if he could see a countdown of how much time he had left before reset.

“They take your lungs and give you new ones. If they call you, you confirm. Then you join intervention and you fight. And I think—I think they took more of me when I joined Intervention. It all goes away; you can’t fight it, they have your heart. The heart is the new mind. The mind controls the body. I fucked something up in Intervention. I think—I don’t kill people. I can’t kill people. The others though, some of them can. They said the war is ending but it’s not. I know it’s not. My handler made me to end the war; I was a wild card. There is a handful of us who can do things even the others can’t. If they aren’t like me—if they aren’t broken or dead or decommissioned—they are still fighting and that means Advancement is still recruiting.”

Foggy tried to pull himself together.

“Thank you for telling me, Matt. Thank you. This is the right thing, I feel it in my gut. I feel it, I swear. Where should we start?”

Matt flinched violently.

“Don’t cry, that’s making me upset. I can’t be—find Elektra. She was—she’s what I was.”

“Okay, okay. We will. Matt. Why? Why tell me now?” Matt pull back a little, frowning. He reached out and gathered the guitar pillow in his arms and held it out to Foggy.

“You bought me this stupid pillow and you said you’re my friend even though I exploded on you just now and I’m a disaster of an android and trust me, and even bigger disaster of a human, but you haven’t called me crazy or defective and you want to help people like me for ‘truth, justice, and the American way.’ I’ve got fifteen seconds, but I’m sold.”

“You remembered all that?”

“Only for now. I’m going to forget. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, that’s okay. Hey.” Foggy gripped Matt’s shoulders, tried to channel every ounce of courage and optimism in his body. “We’ve got you. Everything is going to be okay.”

Matt started to breathe in, wanted to say something. But his eyes close and his head dropped. It was too much to process.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you are wondering how Matt could possibly be human and not-human at the same time and at different times; I tend to think of it along the lines of this line from first chapter: "He went back to his dorm a little bit early and feel asleep early thinking about all the things he’d ever made into people." 
> 
> Matt is what he and the people he interacts with need him to be in that moment. He might view himself as an non-human if it suits his purposes, but as a human to help him meet other needs. Foggy views him as a person because that is what he wants him to be. The scientists are all caught up in their various definitions because, as an almost-professional academic, I can say with confidence that, that is our default state.


End file.
